To be shocked by this government dietary advice for babies and children?

[fourfoxsakes]

from the government in Northern Ireland that is published online? Surely we don’t do these things any more such as mixing baby rice with milk and advising people to feed their very young children rice crispies and cornflakes for breakfast and advising people to give juice with meals! Surely this is bad advice, I am honestly surprised that the government have been allowed to publish this crap. I have no doubt people still do these things which is an individual parenting choice but surely the government shouldn’t be advocating for this?

So, in your view, are UK benefits/minimum wage too low to allow recipients/workers to eat healthily? I.e. in purely financial terms, it is categorically impossible for them to afford to buy and then cook from fresh ingredients?

Yes it’s been quite eye-opening this thread. I’ve done some volunteering with HomeStart before and there are many many children for whom this dietary advice would be so many levels above what they are eating.

Some parents have had disrupted schooling due to chaotic home lives themselves, so have low literacy skills, don’t know how to seek out information or don’t trust it, struggle to read it and understand it, are financially illiterate, have been brought up on an awful diet themselves, no cooking skills as they’ve never been taught, don’t know how a functioning household runs as they’ve never experienced one, have addiction or mental health problems, partners in prison, children with challenging additional needs. I could go on and on.

@QuinqueremeofNiveneh.
I'm not that poster but I'll answer. Current food and fuel prices are making it extremely challenging but in purely financial terms, it is not impossible. However, it is a problem that goes much deeper than financial. It is multi-factorial.

In plain terms, yes.

Oh dear.... Lol. Ignorance reigns.

I didn’t have a problem with Rice Krispies at all, I was responding to someone saying they should never be promoted by any healthcare setting, which I think is a nonsense.

Sorry, I was thinking out loud about the reasons children are given these foods. I know you weren't having a pop (!) at Rice Krispies.

(pun intended)

Oh dear.... Yes otherwise the nutritional impact would be the same as eating the cereal box itself, you might as well pop a multivitamin pill and eat the cardboard box ... But you stay ignorant if that's how you like it - www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/breakfast-cereal-nutritional-claims-box-misleading-research-healthwatch-dr-mallika-marshall/

Have you read anything anyone has actually posted on this thread about public health and who this kind of advice is actually aimed at?

I'm not suggesting that everyone should be like my sister, merely illustrating that it is possible, on a very, very limited budget, to feed your kids in a way that lots of the posters here are claiming to be completely undoable for people like her.

However, I am, genuinely, asking what these challenges that you refer to are? I'm sure you don't know everything about every topic under the sun either. And I clearly don't know all that much about the drivers of poverty, obesity and childhood caries in the UK, but I am genuinely interested!

Because to me it seems like people here keep talking about this group of people who cannot be expected to do even the most modest of basics, like nit-combing their kids or not giving them Coke to drink. Or listening to the health visitor who literally turns up at their door ready and willing to hold their hand and help them. Why? It's terrifying in a country with a comprehensive education system, free healthcare and social security benefits.

(And, just to add, I didn't grow up surrounded by financial privilege and neither did she. My circumstances have changed in adulthood.)

My DD2 certainly wouldn't "eat what was in front of her" even if particularly hungry. Believe me we tried but she would eat only a fairly limited diet. If she could have had spaghetti bolognese (or sometimes simply plain pasta) at every meal then she would have but she only got those if I was cooking them for everyone else. She would eat Weetabix and Rice Krispies, which are fortified cereals so that had to be where she got a lot of her vitamins and minerals from.

Meltdowns were not unknown and she eventually was diagnosed as autistic, albeit high functioning. She's healthy physically though, why do you imply that autistic people are not?

Some children certainly will refuse to eat, even when very hungry. My mother will say that I was one and it drove her to distraction.

My DD2 has two sisters, one older and one younger. All brought up the same way and all offered the same variety of foods. They would usually eat or at least try most things. DD2 simply point blank refused.

Because their lives have been impacted by compound disadvantages beyond poverty. They never learned how to run a home, because their home was so chaotic, they’re in abusive relationships literally parenting in a war zone, they have neither a fridge or a warm coat. Better to acknowledge you have no idea the lives some people live, the circumstances that utterly undermine their parenting capacity, and accept that for some people a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice represents a standard to aspire to.

And how large do you think this particular demographic group is?

I’m interested in your fixation on money as money is just the tip of the iceberg but it sounds like you think it’s the only reason anyone might struggle and just because your sister is feeding her children ‘healthy’ food, anyone can.

Your sister may not have money but she has a huge amount that sets her apart from many others. She presumably grew up in a safe and loving home, was exposed to how a healthy household runs, went to school regularly, is able to read fluently and has at least basic financial literacy, didn’t have parents in prison or addicted to drugs, wasn’t in foster care, and so on. She was set up well for life, or at least reasonably well, like many of us on here, myself included.

For example, a lady who I helped out when I volunteered. She had just had her second baby. Her partner had assaulted her while she was pregnant and was behind bars. She had grown up with a mum who was an alcoholic and a dad in and out of prison. She was almost certainly dyslexic but mum struggled to get her to school in primary due to always being sleeping off drink, so it never got picked up properly and then by secondary she was so far behind she would just skive off. She left with very basic reading skills, no idea how to handle money, no knowledge of how a safe home runs, no reference point for being a good parent as she had never experienced good and loving parenting.

Despite that, she was doing her best. She was doing what she could with what she’d been given, which wasn’t much. She was trying to not repeat the cycle, but she needed support because she literally didn’t know how or where to begin.

There are large pockets of households just like this in clusters in cities, towns, even in our village.

Benefits, mostly yes.

i’m disabled and I have lots of friends who are also disabled as a lot of my social life these days is going to support groups and group physio sessions.

obviously if you have disability in the mix it’s even harder as it’s both time, money and physical effort.

DWP are happy if you can microwave a ready meal.

I do acknowledge it, absolutely! And I'm terrified by it. The UK is basically a failed society, given that this demographic group is allowed to exist within it despite all the very expensive public services that were, essentially, set up to eradicate it and then prevent it from forming again. It's heartbreaking.

I asked another poster but will ask again, how prevalent is this level of deprivation and dysfunction that you describe? How many people in the UK are affected by it?

Did you read the article? It's about vague nutritional claims by manufacturers in America, and it actually says to read the nutritional label on the back to discover what's in it. Breakfast cereals, like bread flour, is fortified in the UK. That information is what we're talking about, no-one is saying Rice Krispies are overtaking goji berries or farro as the latest wonder food.

The fact remains that breakfast cereals being offered in hospital have almost double the iron of porridge, so there's really no need to be shocked at being given them.

@QuinqueremeofNiveneh go on YouTube and have a watch of the programme “Eyes of a Child”
on the BBC. That is the reality of many families.

Is this really the first you are hearing of families like this? It so then you have been incredibly sheltered from life around you. I am 40 and when I was a child, we had kids coming into school without being fed, in smelly old clothes, attending two or three days a week at most, clearly from very chaotic and disordered homes. It’s not new and I am surprised anyone living in this country can be so disconnected from the reality of it. It’s generational and hard to break the cycle.

https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/news/over-two-million-children-in-england-are-growing-up-in-families-where-there-are-serious-risks-major-study-from-childrens-commissioner-reveals-2/#:~:text=Over%20two%20million%20children%20in%20England%20are,mental%20health%20and%20alcohol%20or%20substance%20abuse.

Can I ask if Northern Ireland has fluoride in the water yet which was always being considered but there was no agreement.
And apart from the variety of bread Im struggling with the cultural food differences between NI and the'mainland' which is a whole other discussion.

You seriously over estimate the availability of support for new parents. The standard health visiting pathway where I am consists of 3 visits in the first 21 months. To receive more than that your child needs to be on a child protection pathway or have significant health needs. Health visitors aren’t holding anyone’s hand for the most part.

The families I’ve worked with have always lived in poverty - not the “I can’t put my heating on” poverty. The I have £10 to feed myself and three kids, I’m wearing flip flops in November, my kids clothes were given by social work, I have a microwave in a mouldy kitchen, walking on bare floorboards, mattress on the floor kind of poverty. They’ve fled extreme domestic abuse, have a police marker on their door, live in terror of him or his mates kicking the door down. Have drug dealers living in the flat above, with all the chaos and risk that brings, can’t safely walk their kids to school, need to check the close for used needles before letting the kids walk out the door.

Have limited literacy skills, and are scared of services like health visiting, social work and police because their experiences have been really difficult. Are working shifts, for minimum wage, topped up by universal credit, which isn’t touching the sides because they had to go into debt to buy the mattress on the floor their kids sleep on. They’re helping care for older parents or family members because there’s no help from social care. They’re physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted, deeply traumatised and trying to keep it all together.

The idea of a generous social care safety net is an absolute myth for many, and the result is parents who do well to put food in their kids bellies and get them to school.

For what reason would a hospital ward be able to provide a hot dinner but not a hot breakfast? Because I am sure they serve hot dinners in uk hospitals.

Current stats show around 30% of children live in poverty in the UK, 70% of those have at least 1 working parent. Figures are lower in Scotland in part due to the Scottish child payment, but still sits at 25%, so significant numbers.

Ok.

so looking at barriers:

the U.K. literacy rate is 99%. Which is good. But there are people who leave school unable to read. I worked in a secondary school that was the local hub for students with disabilities and every year there were two or three students who left school not able to read. In most cases this was due to disability - Down’s syndrome or similar - although we did have traveller kids who left unable to read because they’d been to so many primary schools they just fell through the gaps.

I believe the traveller community are generally in favour of their kids learning to read and write these days and so most traveler kids do go to primary school but it’s rare for them to continue on to secondary.

then you have situations where mum and dad might be literate but in polish or Romanian and have very limited English - I’ve done plenty of parents evenings where the student has translated both ways.

more generally about 1 in 6 of the population has low functional literacy
https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-literacy/
which means that they are literate but at a 9-11 year old reading level.

people who have this level of literacy may well struggle to follow recipes and instructions that they are unfamiliar with.

as a maths teacher, problems with numeracy are also very common.

for example, in the maths national curriculum we explicitly teach how to scale recipes - so if a recipe says it makes enough for 4, calculating the ingredients for if you want enough for 2, or for 8 or 6.

these questions are on the gcse at foundation level and probably about a third of the students really, really struggle with them. They can’t remember how many grams in a kilogram, they don’t know what ml is, etc etc.

Jamie Oliver back in 2008 did a show and a cookbook where he taught people some simple recipes - curry, chilli, etc and got them to pass it on, because he was trying to teach both cooking skills and healthy eating to people who have never seen either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie%27s_Ministry_of_Food

Some people seem to have very strong views about rice krispies. They are puffed rice with a small amount of added salt and sugar + vitamins. They are not akin to eating cardboard. I am not living in poverty and I would be quite happy for my child to sometimes have them for breakfast as part of a balanced diet (like the one suggested). I am really not sure why people have such an extreme reaction to them.
A child eating the suggested diet would be getting a balanced menu. The much lauded porridge features as does stew, veggies etc. If you are 'shocked' by this you must live a very sheltered life.